 1. Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, edited by Allan Stoekl (University of Minnesota Press)
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 2. André Breton: Nadja, tr. Richard Howard (Grove Press) |
 3. René Daumal: The Powers of the Word, tr. Mark Polizzotti (City Lights)
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 4. Witold Gombrowicz: Cosmos, tr. Eric Mosbacher (Grove Press)
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 5. Knut Hamsun: Mysteries, tr. Gerry Bothmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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 6. Henri Michaux: Selected Writings, tr. Richard Ellmann (New Directions)
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 7. Gérard de Nerval: Aurélia, tr. Geoffrey Wagner (Exact Change)
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 8. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage)
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 9. Raymond Queneau: Pierrot Mon Ami, tr. Barbara Wright (Dalkey Archive)
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 10. Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations, tr. Louise Varčse (New Directions)
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And maybe I can add an eleventh, since she wouldn’t disrupt the alphabetization (though “disrupting the alphabet” seems like a phrase that could describe her writing):
Unica Zürn/The Man of Jasmine, tr. Malcolm Green (Atlas Press).
But the Zürn reminds me of the more general debt I owe to Malcolm Green, since his Atlas Press anthology, Black Letters Unleashed, reintroduced and redefined German literature for me back in college; or Simon Watson Taylor’s translations of Alfred Jarry, etc. etc. So it is easier to cite the publishing houses whose translation programs were formative for me: New Directions, Grove Press, City Lights, Dalkey Archive, Atlas Press, Exact Change, Sun & Moon--the first time I picked up Michaux, for instance, wasn’t because of an interest in Michaux, or a curiosity over Joyce-Yeats-Wilde scholar Ellmann’s name in conjunction with a French-Belgian author, but because it was a New Directions book and figured into their series of selected writings of French poets. |
